Rails interview questions

rubyonrails-talk
1

It seems I have been asked to list all the advantages of Rails in an interview a few times. I was able to come up with many of the easy ones like active record abstarcts SQL, dynamic HTML, and so on, but I am starting to feel like I need to go and find the official list so I get it all right. It often seems like one flub up and the interviewer gets turned off or something. I guess I have been so busy trying to learn Rails and other web technologies that I don't have all the answers to these questions. By the way, has it ever happened to you that you where asked to solve a problem in an interview and you where so nervous that you screwed it up ? Some of these interviews go on so long that fatigue sets in so that eventually you end up messing some question up, or at least that's what happened to me. I had an interview for Java where I was in a conference room and they had people coming and going grilling me with all kinds of questions, having me write sample code and nit picking it apart. I must have talked to 10 people. At the time I was focued on Rails so my Java was a bit rusty.

Anyway, it seems I am also supposed to know the answer to what is the downside of Rails ? I don't know, it's a little slower than Java, I heard that it doesn't work as good as Perl Catalyst for legacy database, I don't know I give up, please tell me all the answers !!!

2

It seems I have been asked to list all the advantages of Rails in an interview a few times. I was able to come up with many of the easy ones like active record abstarcts SQL, dynamic HTML, and so on, but I am starting to feel like I need to go and find the official list so I get it all right.

The official list? This is not a very useful interview question. Assuming this is for a Rails job, the question says nothing about your ability. At best it might reveal things that have annoyed you about other environments that happen to be things that Rails fixes. Asking for Rails' disadvantages would be more useful, in that it probably establishes how far you've gone into Rails (have you hit the sharp edges yet) and what levels of pain you're willing to tolerate. Even then it's kind of weak.

By the way, has it ever happened to you that you where asked to solve a problem in an interview and you where so nervous that you screwed it up?

This is one of the reasons that companies need to learn to use problem solving selectively. It's critically important to interviewers that you can solve problems, and at times can solve them under pressure. Asking a lot of questions cold isn't always the way to establish that.

-faisal